Note: Because of inclement weather, the event has been canceled.
Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Lydia Liu will present a public lecture at the University of Mary Washington on Thursday, March 22. The free talk, “Fables of Romantic Science: Robinson Crusoe’s Naval Career,” is at 5 p.m. in Lee Hall, Room 411.
During her two-day visit, Liu also will meet with UMW honors students, Chinese students and faculty in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and members of the University’s Phi Beta Kappa.
Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is the founding director of the Tsinghua-Columbia Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She writes in English and Chinese.
In addition, Liu is author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious; The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making; and Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity.
More recently, she is co-editor and co-translator of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. A creative writer in Chinese, Liu is author of The Nesbit Code, a mock detective story.
Additional information about the Visiting Scholar Program can be found on Phi Beta Kappa’s website (www.pbk.org/programs).
